Talk:I Have Always Been a Monster/@comment-4715955-20161220221206
As usual I'll be posting my first impressions as I go, then I'll come back tomorrow and add to them when I'm fresh. I've tried several times to sit down and read this story in the past, and I realize now that the reason it's taken me so long to get to it (apart from my own lack of professionalism) is that it just isn't engaging. Ixodida pulled me right in and I read it in one sitting; this opens with a typical rambling first-person "I was normal once" creepypasta intro that makes me want to go do or read something else within just a couple paragraphs; the later narrative is more of the same, and doesn't encourage me to continue. It's just dull reading. It's a shame, too, because the idea of the narrator writing to a potential enemy he hasn't met is an interesting idea -- one that might be more interesting from the hunter's perspective, which would require you to show us something happening rather than feed us exposition. I wanna see the protagonist enter the site of the former school and deal with the horrific child-demons the narrator describes. Another chapter in and now the narrator confesses to killing his family as a sacrifice to "Him". None of this is really necessary, honestly: the idea of a future tribesman venturing through the ruins of civilization to kill a monster that used to be a human being is all you need. I wish I had more to say, but that's all every chapter is: tedious narrative by a typical creepypasta monster narrator, describing things that would be much more interesting to see actually happen. Once I reached the octopoid bit, I started to doubt whether he was still writing to the guy. How can he warn the hunter that he's standing on a monster's shell and not a rock? Did the hunter read that note while he was standing on it? How did he not know the things weren't carnivorous if he's been around so long? Where is he leaving these notes anyway? Did the narrator turn into a tree at the end? Do I understand that correctly? Am I supposed to glean some significance from the transformation? Is he still able to move and write the notes as a tree? This feels like another of those undeveloped ideas I would've left on my hard drive until I found a better way to write it (yeah, I've got so many of those I'm tripping over them). The premise works well enough for a story, but the execution is the worst possible choice: a narrrator rambling about himself while someone else has all the fun between chapters. There are ways to make that engaging, but the narrator simply isn't; and even if he were, the stuff he describes the hunter doing would be so much more interesting if we were on the hunter's side, watching him deal with it all in real-time, maybe giving us subtle hints that the horrible places he's venturing through used to be a human city. None of the narrator's backstory was interesting: again, typical creepypasta "narrator is the villain" shit that isn't even important and only serves to re-reiterate the point that the narrator is an asshole. I couldn't care less about his rise through his little cult's ranks, or his acts of murder and depravity, and all that other horror porn crap; what piqued my interest was the hunter's journey that I would love to have actually seen in more detail, if only the narrator would stop going on and on about himself for two minutes. Self-absorbed narrators are the absolute worst. Those are my first impressions, and I'm not sure they'll change honestly. Needs a rewrite from a different perspective, maybe as a post-apocalypse adventure story instead of a horror.